


Widow

by starcunning (Vannevar)



Category: Horus Heresy - Various Authors, Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 18:50:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1110307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vannevar/pseuds/starcunning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rogal Dorn is dead, and Janetia Krole is left to mourn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Widow

**Author's Note:**

> Companion piece to Kuja's incredible "When the Wall Fell." Go sit on him to mirror it here so I can collect them together.

> _I tire of globes and races,_  
>  _Too long the game is played;_  
>  _What without him is summer’s pomp,_  
>  _Or winter’s frozen shade?_  
>  Fragment from the “Song of Nature,” unknown author, Terra, M2

There were signs of age that were not visible from the outside, like the rings on a tree betraying its true age only when one cut into its heart. It was possible, now, to grow old and never stoop, to never see a wrinkle mar wellmade features. To never succumb to the thousand ailments that claimed the elderly and turned them into a shivering, coughing mass and robbed them of their vitality. It was possible to never age a day in body while the soul decrepified as it will, and there were events in a woman’s life that would lance into her and destroy her youth.

And, Janetia Krole discovered one day, it was possible to outlive the angels of death.

They were not truly immortal. The Sister-Commander had known that for some time. She’d seen them die in droves: beside her, and then at Prospero before her. And after they’d brought flame to Tizca, it seemed the Adeptus Astartes died on all sides around her, in soul and in body. The schism that rent the Imperium touched none so much as the Emperor’s Angels of Death. It was of their making and turned them inward upon themselves, gilding the Aquila with blood rather than gold.

And when it had ended, Janetia Krole had breathed a sigh of relief that the fearful trip was done, though she wept bitter tears at the loss. When it was ended, from Somnus Citadel on Luna she watched the greatest civilization in the history of mankind struggle to pick up the pieces even as she struggled to do the same with the Silent Sisterhood.

Through it all, she longed for a man of gold with hair like white flame to lift the torch and bear them forward, but the Phalanx had broken from orbit long since and no longer glittered above the Himalay like some impossibly vast jewel. Rogal Dorn hunted traitors while Guilliman in his stead debated policies. The unlovely rumor of infighting between the brothers had felt like a weight in Krole’s heart.

Eventually, Dorn had capitulated. He had come home and bent his will to Guilliman’s new codex. He had mantled his First Captain with mastery of a full third of his forces, and Krole had smiled at the act. For all their playful banter, Rogal Dorn still loved best his most irrepressible son. And Sigismund’s Templars had made overtures immediately to the Sororitas Silentia, having seen the extent of their proof against the Warp. The Black Templars, she learned quickly, disdained psykers, made bitter by the long years of fighting before. It only made sense that they would see allies in Krole’s vast cadre of Untouchable warriors. As she had to Sigismund’s master before him, Janetia Krole bent knee and promised support wherever she may.

And then the Phalanx and its Fists were gone again, leaving Krole within Somnus Citadel to ponder if the vast warship stood as empty as her own halls. Pariahs, especially females, of the calibre that Krole required were as much a rarity as Astartes candidates, and the siege of Terra had certainly put her well below the strength of Guilliman’s new chapters. Her promise to Sigismund was all but lipservice and both had known it, not for any lack of willingness or desire on Krole’s part, but from the atrocities that had come before. It was like a wound on her heart, as foreboding as the blackened iron walls of the Fortress of Terra below. Janetia Krole longed to look upon the sportive sun again.

When next he came to Terra, she was elsewhere, and his duties did not allow him to attend her return, but she found upon her return a pair of gifts. The first was a glimmer of gold upon the highest spires of what had once been the Palace of Unity. The intervening weeks — which stretched into months, then years — saw the Fortress of Terra stripped down to bare, grey stone. Krole swore she could see the shadows of immense scaffolds ringing work areas, which would inevitably bloom into beauty and light once more. It was like watching the first flowers grow in a forest charred black by flames.

And in the gallery of her private dormitories, Janetia Krole found a painting in oils upon a rood panel. It was the bust of a man with craggy, implacable features: an eagle-straight nose and strong, proud chin and jaw, his face almost a series of blocky planes rather than olive skin. His eyes were dark, his expression thoughtful. His hair was white-gold and swept up from his head like dancing flame, close cropped but touseled, the only point of eccentricity on an otherwise perfectly ordered countenance.

Janetia Krole had wept to see the face of the man she loved captured in such painstaking detail.

More tears would come decades later. After almost a century’s respite from ill tidings on such a level, the Imperium mourned the death of a primarch, and Janetia Krole mourned the death of her lover.

— — — — —

It was over a year later when the Phalanx finally returned to Terra from the fringes of the Eye of Terror. They had stayed to see the foe routed before making their retreat. The mobile fortress would proceed, she suspected, to Inwit, to allow the people of that system to mourn their brightest son in turn. Janetia Krole still wore black when they came. Her duty plate had a curiously antiqued look to it, the paint having worn through in places to re-expose the details of silver filigree, her white tabards replaced with heavy swaths of dark velvet. Even her vermeil tail of hair had been changed. She had done this once before, at the death of Sanguinius and the Emperor, but the sorrow seemed to hang upon her like a mantle.

She brought no novice with her to translate when she took a shuttle from Luna’s surface to the halls of the Phalanx, and her pilot was ordered behind when she departed. It was not borne of lack of desire to speak to these orphaned sons, but the task was much too personal for Janetia Krole to want to involve a newly sworn novice. Philaenis, once like a daughter to her, was long dead, and Padua—the last to translate for her when she spoke with the Fists— had spent the coin of her life upon the walls of the palace. The Sister-Commander could not bring herself to involve a third woman.

One face alone came to greet her, and she was glad it was one she knew: a tall man, and impossibly broad-shouldered, thick with muscle even out of his armor. The Astartes was of his master’s mien, with rugged features, though his hair was dark and his jaw thick with a carefully-ordered beard. He wore a loose, draping black tunic which exposed the rubberized surface of the bodyglove beneath, the simple garment clasped at his throat by a gilded fist. Behind her caul of dark cloth, Krole swallowed.

 _Captain,_  she greeted him, using the Astartes battlesign and bowing at the waist, sweeping a hand out behind her in courtly fashion.

 _Sister Raptor_ _,_  he signed in ThoughtMark, and her eyes went wide for just a moment. Efried offered her a watery smile.  _It is good to see you._  Then he offered her his arm, and Janetia Krole took it.

Because she knew the palace, Krole knew the halls of the Phalanx at least a little, and Third Captain Efried’s arm beneath her hand steadied her, which was all to the good. The unexpected gesture had touched her, and Krole worried that even at this early juncture, she might cry. The Imperial Fists — in black mourning garb all — dutifully ignored her, going about their work with set jaw and stony eye.

Rogal Dorn had not shown her this place. It was a room of vaulted ceilings and high windows, blast screens open now to let shafts of reflected light filter down onto the dark, polished wood. The panels were accented by brass nails, and tapestries of vibrant color hung at intervals along the gallery. Between those were shelves, bearing richly bound volumes, globes of planets brought to compliance, or small objets-d’art of a hundred varieties. The floors were of quarried stone, a pattern of interlocking circles visible where no richly patterned carpets lay. There was before them a procession of Astartes, hooded and morose.

Third Captain Efried unwound his arm from around Krole’s, placed one massive hand upon her shoulder, and said a single word in a thick accent, its guttural phonemes betraying it as the native tongue of Inwit. The gathered Astartes turned to face him, and then in surprisingly ordered fashion, filed past the pair.

The Fists were not nearly the monolith she had expected. Though well-groomed beards like Efried’s seemed to be in fashion, there was surprising character in the faces that passed. No few of them bore service studs upon their brow, declaiming the length of their tenure and the depth of their loyalty, and others were limned by old scars. On a handful she noted the faded markings of Necromundan tattoos, black ink begun to feather over time. The men looked at her with curiosity or with empathy as they passed, and Janetia Krole could not help but wonder what the Imperial Fists knew of their genefather’s history with the Sororitas Silentia.

At last, the doors closed behind them with a sound of heavy finality, and Captain Efried lifted his hand from Janetia’s shoulder to offer it to her once more. She took it, with a wordless nod of thanks, and hand in hand they proceeded down that vaulted hallway. She could hear the swish of cloth and the soft crush of velvet underfoot as they went, as loud to her as any battle hymn.

The niche had been made for a statue once, Janetia surmised based on its design. Now, instead it boasted a façade of black marble, trimmed with gold. It was segmented by square columns into three parts, the capitals also gilded. The centerpiece was a rectangular mosaic of the VII Primarch arrayed triumphant before the unforgiving crags of Inwit. He was in the splendor of his battleplate, his cloak mantled about his shoulders. His right hand was pressed to his heart, the tines of the claw on his left hand splayed slightly. A heroic piece, the better of any Krole had seen in a thousand temples. It was abutted by shallow niches to either side, which were arched at their top. Affixed to each shallow wall was a reliquary of gold, the faint ozone scent of a stasis generator now mingling with the scent of old leather and beeswax. A skeletal hand was preserved in each, left and right, hung high above the reach of mortals or even Astartes.

But all of that was inconsequential before what lay within the niche. A slab of scarlet corundum supported pillars of gold, inlaid with onyx, and these rose to Janetia Krole’s chest. Upon a field of black they laid his remains.

Janetia had thought her understanding of the difference between mortals and Astartes sufficient, but the bones of a Primarch were almost alien to look upon — they were vaster than her own, not just in height but in girth, and in places she could see the fused lines of old fractures. The chest was nearly a solid barrel of bone, only the slightest gaps between the lowest ribs. Something had broken his sternum once, but the rest of him remained whole, the massive bones distorted only slightly by the amber that encased them.

The stone was the color of honey, perfectly clear and without flaw, its surface polished to a satiny sheen. It was the memory-perfect reproduction of a body Janetia Krole had never allowed herself to forget: more a fortress than the spacefaring wonder that stretched for miles around her, Rogal Dorn’s fleshly body had been hewn with the same craftsmanship as this inert remembrance. Krole was only briefly aware when Efried let her hand go, because she lifted it along with her twin to cup her face, her fingertips brushing at the corners of her eyes before any tears could fall.

She heard the Third Captain withdraw a few steps, take a deep breath, and sigh through his nose. She heard the faint, tremulous shudder as he did so, and imagined that he swallowed his sobs as she did.

Janetia Krole bent over the prone form of the golden son of the Imperium, pressed her brow to the stone encasing Dorn’s own, and wept. Her cries were silent, though they wracked her body. She had sworn an oath, an oath which she had valued, and she mourned a man who knew too well the value of keeping one’s word. Her own hand went to clasp one of the boneless fists crossed over Dorn’s chest, fingers worrying at the cool stone.

She had believed that the age of darkness had come to an end. That all could be made just the way it once was. And she knew he had believed it too; that the restoration of the Palace had been the manifestation of that desire, enacted as only one of the sons of the Emperor could have done. She had believed the sportive sun would shine again. But the reality of his death made Krole wary of the pressing darkness around them.

The Archtraitor had been defeated, but like the monsters of old his cohort continued on without their head, bleeding the Imperium of life and light, stealing from them the men created to bear torches forward and drive back the darkness. It was difficult in this moment not to succumb to her despair.

But she had loved this man, and he had loved her. There had been a quiet strength to him, a thoughtfulness to his manner that underscored the way he looked upon the future. Rogal Dorn had been her hope, and she suspected that were she to give up hope now, he would not have loved her at all.

At length, Efried approached her again, and she straightened, looking into his face. An Astartes face, wet with tears.

 _What happened to his hands?_  she asked, then held up her own illustratively.  
"They will be inscribed with the names of those chosen to bear his legacy forward," Efried said softly, throatily. "Maximus Thane’s name will be first, upon the first metacarpal." Krole frowned just slightly. "Scrimshaw is an ancient tradition upon Inwit," Efried told her, settling his hand between her shoulderblades. "But Thane’s name is not the only one written upon our father’s body."

The space marine knelt, gesturing for Krole to do so beside him, and at last she sunk to her knees, letting another shuddering sigh pass her lips. At Efried’s gentle urging, she leaned forward and found she could see into the empty cavity of the primarch’s chest, the refracted light of amber stone providing the barest hint of luminosity. There was something etched along his left ribs, scarcely legible.

She looked over into that swarthy face, and Efried nodded once. Close to the primarch’s heart, someone had written a name—her name. From the outside, it was hidden from view, like a dear secret.

It was a long span of time later that Janetia Krole and Captain Efried emerged from the reclusiam, and she kissed the Fist’s cheek before she departed aboard her silver shuttle and returned to the cold spires of Somnus Citadel.

She did not stay long, bearing a massive rectangular parcel draped with black cloth and demanding transit to her flagship  _Tenax Propositi_ _._  Upon her arrival, Krole ordered the portrait of her that had hung in her gallery removed and rehung somewhere more privately.

Sitting quietly upon the edge of the bed she had once shared with the only man who dared love an Untouchable, Janetia Krole looked up at the pair of portraits now hung in tandem, face to face, and saw from the subtlest details worked into their backgrounds that they had always been meant to be displayed as a pair.


End file.
